The company was forced to write-down $900 million in inventory and Surface’s future was in jeopardy.Beneath A Surface tells the inside story of how Microsoft turned its hardware dreams into a reality with new details about the challenges Panos and his team had to overcome as well as the internal politics that nearly killed the brand.For fans of Microsoft and those who are interested in the business of building brands, Beneath A Surface is a must read that tells the inside story of how Microsoft turned a failure into a fortune.

    this is one of those rare books that will change your beliefs - and in doing so will change your life. tHE ANt AND tHE FERRARI offers readers a clear, navigable path through the big questions that confront us all today. What is the meaning of life? Can we be ethical beings in today's world? Can we know if there is life after death? Is there such a thing as Absolute truth? What caused the Big Bang and why should you care?

    Putting people into places and situations unprecedented in history is stirred the imagination while the human experience was expanding and redefining. Yet, space exploration compels humans to confront a hostile environment of cosmic radiations, radical changes in the gravity and magnetic fields, as well as social isolation. Therefore, any space traveller is submitted to relevant health-related threats. In the twenty-first century, human space flight is poised to continue, but it will enjoy the ongoing developments in science and technology. It will become more networked, more global, and more oriented toward primary goals. A novel international human space flight policy could help achieve these objectives by clarifying the rationale, the ethics of acceptable risk, the role of remote presence, and the need for balance between funding and ambition to justify the risk of human lives. In order to address such a challenge, a preliminary careful survey of the available scientific data is mandatory to set forth adequate countermeasures. Envisaged solutions should provide a sound and technically feasible approach for counteracting microgravity and cosmic rays effects, which represent the main health risk for space crews. This objective must necessarily be sustained by national/international space agencies, which would coordinate their common efforts into a defined international spaceflight program.

     This book contains an introduction to quantum mechanics, with complete instructions and videos showing you how to program a real quantum computer, provided by IBM.

    A frightening and highly entertaining look into the hidden, corrupt, and dangerous world of online advertising where billions of dollars are being stolen; personal information about us is being collected and sold 24-hours a day; and important principles of a free society are being undermined.

    Best-selling novelist David Hewson, author of the ever-popular Writing A Novel with Scrivener, offers a professional insight into how to use this unique app for writing fiction. This ebook covers all the aspects of Ulysses a writer needs to master in order to produce a finished book, from initial planning through to completed ebook, Word file or PDFs for publication, reading and revision. You will learn how to use Ulysses to structure a book into parts and scenes, ways to manage research and ideas and how to develop a novel from a bare outline through to first draft and revisions. Hewson also describes how Ulysses stores work uniquely in its own library, enabling you to work on the same draft manuscript across different machines while on the move. For budding screenwriters there is a section on how to use Ulysses to produce scripts to professional formats that can be edited later in movie apps such as Final Draft. And this release will also include a free upgrade to an updated edition covering the next release of Ulysses and the forthcoming iPad app. David Hewson (www.davidhewson.com) is the author of more than 25 novels published around the world. He adapted the award-winning TV series The Killing into acclaimed novel and recently launched a new crime series set in Amsterdam with The House of Dolls which has been optioned for Dutch TV.

    

    A classic text by the author who developed ELIZA, a natural-language processing system.

     America is an urban nation. More than two thirds of us live on the 3 percent of land that contains our cities. Yet cities get a bad rap: they're dirty, poor, unhealthy, crime ridden, expensive, environmentally unfriendly... Or are they? As Edward Glaeser proves in this myth-shattering book, cities are actually the healthiest, greenest, and richest (in cultural and economic terms) places to live. New Yorkers, for instance, live longer than other Americans; heart disease and cancer rates are lower in Gotham than in the nation as a whole. More than half of America's income is earned in twenty-two metropolitan areas. And city dwellers use, on average, 40 percent less energy than suburbanites. Glaeser travels through history and around the globe to reveal the hidden workings of cities and how they bring out the best in humankind. Even the worst cities-Kinshasa, Kolkata, Lagos- confer surprising benefits on the people who flock to them, including better health and more jobs than the rural areas that surround them. Glaeser visits Bangalore and Silicon Valley, whose strangely similar histories prove how essential education is to urban success and how new technology actually encourages people to gather together physically. He discovers why Detroit is dying while other old industrial cities-Chicago, Boston, New York-thrive. He investigates why a new house costs 350 percent more in Los Angeles than in Houston, even though building costs are only 25 percent higher in L.A. He pinpoints the single factor that most influences urban growth-January temperatures-and explains how certain chilly cities manage to defy that link. He explains how West Coast environmentalists have harmed the environment, and how struggling cities from Youngstown to New Orleans can "shrink to greatness." And he exposes the dangerous anti-urban political bias that is harming both cities and the entire country. Using intrepid reportage, keen analysis, and eloquent argument, Glaeser makes an impassioned case for the city's import and splendor. He reminds us forcefully why we should nurture our cities or suffer consequences that will hurt us all, no matter where we live.

    It also provides an overview of different security topics such as identifying, categorizing and protecting your assets on AWS, managing access to AWS resources using accounts, users and groups and suggesting ways you can secure your data, your operating systems and applications and overall infrastructure in the cloud.

    Real rationality, of the sort studied by psychologists, social scientists, and mathematicians. The kind of rationality where you make good decisions, even when it's hard; where you reason well, even in the face of massive uncertainty; where you recognize and make full use of your fuzzy intuitions and emotions, rather than trying to discard them. In "Rationality: From AI to Zombies," Eliezer Yudkowsky explains the science underlying human irrationality with a mix of fables, argumentative essays, and personal vignettes. These eye-opening accounts of how the mind works (and how, all too often, it doesn't!) are then put to the test through some genuinely difficult puzzles: computer scientists' debates about the future of artificial intelligence (AI), physicists' debates about the relationship between the quantum and classical worlds, philosophers' debates about the metaphysics of zombies and the nature of morality, and many more. In the process, "Rationality: From AI to Zombies" delves into the human significance of correct reasoning more deeply than you'll find in any conventional textbook on cognitive science or philosophy of mind. A decision theorist and researcher at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, Yudkowsky published earlier drafts of his writings to the websites Overcoming Bias and Less Wrong. "Rationality: From AI to Zombies" compiles six volumes of Yudkowsky's essays into a single electronic tome. Collectively, these sequences of linked essays serve as a rich and lively introduction to the science—and the art—of human rationality.

     The 3D Printing Handbook provides practical advice on selecting the right technology and how-to design for 3D printing, based upon first-hand experience from the industry’s leading experts. In this book: The mechanisms behind all major 3D printing technologies The benefits and limitations of each technology Decision making tools for technology selection Actionable design advice and guidelines Industry case studies from world-leading brands

    Can our world support that? What kind of world will it be? Those answering these questions generally fall into two deeply divided groups--Wizards and Prophets, as Charles Mann calls them in this balanced, authoritative, nonpolemical new book. The Prophets, he explains, follow William Vogt, a founding environmentalist who believed that in using more than our planet has to give, our prosperity will lead us to ruin. Cut back! was his mantra. Otherwise everyone will lose! The Wizards are the heirs of Norman Borlaug, whose research, in effect, wrangled the world in service to our species to produce modern high-yield crops that then saved millions from starvation. Innovate! was Borlaug's cry. Only in that way can everyone win! Mann delves into these diverging viewpoints to assess the four great challenges humanity faces--food, water, energy, climate change--grounding each in historical context and weighing the options for the future. With our civilization on the line, the author's insightful analysis is an essential addition to the urgent conversation about how our children will fare on an increasingly crowded Earth.

    

    It presents a learning journey, not definitive guidance. It describes the experiences of a development team with no prior CQRS proficiency in building, deploying (to Windows Azure), and maintaining a sample real-world, complex, enterprise system to showcase various CQRS and ES concepts, challenges, and techniques.The development team did not work in isolation; we actively sought input from industry experts and from a wide group of advisors to ensure that the guidance is both detailed and practical.The CQRS pattern and event sourcing are not mere simplistic solutions to the problems associated with large-scale, distributed systems. By providing you with both a working application and written guidance, we expect you’ll be well prepared to embark on your own CQRS journey.